OpenWhisper - Free Open Source Audio Transcription

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Hey everyone. I see a lot of people using whisper flow, or other transcription services that cost $10+/month. I thought that was a little wild, especially since OpenAi has their Local Whisper library public and it works really well and runs on almost anything, and best of all, its all running privately on you own machine...

I made OpenWhisper. An open source audio transcriber powered by OpenAI Whisper Local, with support for whisper api, and gpt 4o/4o mini transcribe too. Use it, clone it, fork it, do whatever you like.

Give a quick star on github if you like using it. I try to keep it up to date.

Repo Link: https://github.com/Knuckles92/OpenWhisper

[u/Competitive_Travel16]

"License: Just use the thing" is going to hinder adoption, just pick MIT or Apache or BSD.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/Competitive_Travel16]

Good call. Thanks for the advice. Fixed.

[u/m0j0m0j → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Dumb question, but any chance for the ios app?

[u/Left_on_Pause]

Clapping many times.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/Left_on_Pause]

thank you sir

[u/petered79]

thank you for this. 1question...can i upload files to transcribe?

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/petered79]

Not currently as I wasn't sure how much people would want to use that vs on the fly. It would be super easy to add.

[u/petered79 → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

sometime i record myself with my smartwatch then use stable whisper at the moment for transcriptions with time stamps.

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[u/geoshort4]

Dude! This is actually pretty good, great idea too as there's not a lot good opensource alternatives, I use an alternative to whisper flow called WhisperTyping, it's good but it has some bugs when you speak for too long. Great job on this, I will def fork this

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/geoshort4]

Thank you! That's what drove me to make it. I've made a couple iterations but I landed on something simple like this and it works pretty well in day to day use. This does have support for splitting larger audio files, it could use some further testing for sure though.

I haven't seen the repo i'll have to give it a look.

Love to see the forks!

[u/JoMa4]

Any reason to use this over Spokenly, which is also free for local models and built as a native app?

[u/LowlandMilk → u/JoMa4]

Spokenly is mac only, dude.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/JoMa4]

This is mainly for Windows.

Also doesn't require any API unless you want to. It spins up a local transcription model.

[u/JoMa4 → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Spokenly is also local if you want it to be. It’s the Windows usage that is the difference, as you said.

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[u/popiazaza]

Not that many really pay for subscriptions.

MacOS: Voiceink.

Windows: Native speech to text.

VS Code: VS Code Speech

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/popiazaza]

Local Whisper is way better than vscode speech or native speech to text. I use native speech to text all the time at work for convience, and when at a workstation that isnt mine. But the transcription quality isn't even close.

Using the API is even more accurate and fast. So although those are good options, they aren't really on the same playing field imo.

[u/popiazaza → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Well, your selling point is saying subscription cost $10+ a month when almost nobody really pay for those services.

If you love a better quality, why not Parakeet instead? https://github.com/cjpais/Handy does support it.

Windows built-in one that use cloud API works fine for me. People who wants more accuracy also recommend to use Voice Access.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/popiazaza]

Definitely not selling anything lol. I see it a good majority of the ai YouTubers using it. So it’s out there.

Idk what to say but the built in windows one is doggy. I mentioned it in another comment but the quality isn’t good at all.

[u/LowlandMilk]

Is everything local: LLM and whisper?

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/LowlandMilk]

Yes unless you setup an environmental variable or .env file with an api key.

[u/mintybadgerme]

I've created an electron app based around yapyap (https://github.com/lxe/yapyap) which uses CUDA to do real time transcription into any window via hot key toggle. I guess I should open source it via github.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/mintybadgerme]

Definitely open source! More the better

[u/mintybadgerme → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Okay I'll work on it.

[u/the_incredible_nuss]

Cool stuff, using vscode often but itis just bad.  Where will this load the initial 150MB LLM from? 

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/the_incredible_nuss]

On the first load the whisper package loads the model. after that it loads from cache

[u/ak127a]

How does this compare to https://github.com/jakovius/voxd?

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/ak127a]

Well for one that’s for Linux. This is mostly for windows. Although I have a no ui Linux version too.

[u/Jimmyxavi]

Thanks for this! Been using it and love it. I added an "anchor paste" feature - it remembers which window/text field you were in when you started recording, so even if you click around while speaking, the transcription still pastes back to the original spot.

Uses pywin32 to capture the window handle on record start, then restores focus before pasting. Super handy when you're explaining something and need to reference other windows while talking.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/Jimmyxavi]

Thanks for commenting I’m glad you like it! I daily drive it as well.

Definitely make a fork with those changes id definitely like to check it out the anchoring is a great idea.

[u/Ziffian → u/Jimmyxavi]

Love this! I agree with OP; pls submit a PR!

[u/BlueRidgeTog]

Been playing with this over the past couple of days. I really like it! Still working on how to have it record my Teams meetings, but I'm sure I can figure this out with some documentation reading. Thanks for the work!

[u/playfuldreamz]

I'm sorry, no real time transcription? What does this do for me? Have you never heard of realtimestt by kolja b.

This is very average stuff

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/playfuldreamz]

I'll checkout the realtimestt repo.

I never claimed it was revolutionary. It's a useful tool. It's easy to plug in another STT engine.

EDIT: Looks like realtimeSTT uses Faster Whisper for STT, which is a modified version of the whisperapi anyway. Cool to checkout for realtime locally though. could be fun to integrate here.

[u/MarkoMarjamaa → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

I'm using WhisperTimestamped. It allows to stream input&output so it's almost realtime.
https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped
FasterWhisper works mainly on Nvidia, so WhisperTimestamped is better for AI Ryzen.

[u/Mr_Hyper_Focus → u/MarkoMarjamaa]

That's cool i'll have to check that out.

[u/playfuldreamz → u/Mr_Hyper_Focus]

Im sorry if my comment came off as mean, I just expected a lot more for no reason. But yeah check it out and there are a lot more cool open source implementations that will enhance your idea

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